Beschreibungen

This volume tells the story of major organizational change efforts at one municipal youth-serving organization to better support healthy youth development system wide. Presenting the viewpoints of young people, frontline staff, supervisors, managers, and the director, it reviews how the organization developed and transformed. Each article then describes the different strategies and tactics used to support organizational transformation. Learn: How a youth work professional development strategy ended up as an organizational development and change strategy How the partnership with a university expanded to include community-based research and evaluation to support youth program development and improvement within the organization. How youth advice structures can support high-quality youth programming and, by extension, improvements in organizational supports for quality youth programs How partnerships with other organizations supported ongoing adaptation of the organization to better address youth needs This is the 139th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

Issue Editors’ Notes 1 Ross VeLure Roholt, Michael Baizerman, Sheetal Rana, Kathy Korum Executive Summary 5 Proem 9 Christopher B. Coleman Preface 11 Michael Hahm 1. Missing in the youth development literature: The organization as host, cage, and promise 13 Ross VeLure Roholt, Michael Baizerman, Sheetal Rana, Kathy Korum This article discusses how questions about organization change and development are directly connected to positive youth development efforts and how they provide a beginning research agenda on youth organizations. 2. From youth worker professional development to organizational change 27 Sheetal Rana with Briana Baumgardner, Ofir Germanic, Randy Graff, Kathy Korum, Megan Mueller, Steve Randall, Tim Simmons, Gina Stokes, Will Xiong, Karen Kolb Peterson This article describes an ongoing, innovative youth worker professional development, its underlying philosophies and ethos, and its accomplishments. Also included are challenges and barriers that this initiative faced and lessons learned from it. 3. Use of research for transforming youth agencies 59 Michael Baizerman, Emily Rence, Sean Johnson This article describes the collaborative research strategy used by Youth Studies, University of Minnesota faculty and students, and Saint Paul (municipal) Parks and Recreation over the past five years as part of the effort to enhance Saint Paul Parks and Recreation’s youth services and programs. 4. Youth advisory structures: Listening to young people to support quality youth services 79 Ross VeLure Roholt, Megan Mueller This article analyzes youth advisory structures, their formal structural arrangements, the process used by each, and the practice of working with young people using certain processes within different types of formal organizational structures. 5. Shaping partnerships by doing the work 101 Kathy Korum This article describes partnership approaches that encourage new ways of thinking about or working with other organizations that foster a space for negotiation and focus on meeting youth and community needs. 6. What can local foundations do to support youth service system change efforts? 115 Wokie Weah, Marcus Pope This article describes an organization’s experience of a collaborative approach to funding Saint Paul Parks and Recreation to help the agency continue and expand its innovations in youth work and to diffuse specific strategies into other recreation centers. 7. From lessons learned to emerging practices 121 Michael Baizerman, Ross VeLure Roholt, Kathy Korum, Sheetal Rana This article brings together all lessons learned over our six years of work with Saint Paul Parks and Recreation and suggests the scientific truths, that is, and practice utility of these. Index 147

Organizations are basic to youth development practice and programming. This is their home, their host, their context. Most youth work and youth programs in the United States exist within and because they receive care and support from their host organization. Scholarly attention on youth organizations—the structure, ethos, culture, social organization, and processes of these—are basic and necessary to fully support healthy youth development practices, programs, and opportunities. Without organizations, these would be homeless. To get more and better healthy youth development programs requires housing them in supportive organizations. Some organizations are fully or somewhat effective, in part because they have responded well to the young people they serve—that is, they have met the wants and needs of their everyday changing clients, as well as the bureaucratic and funding worlds in which they are enmeshed. It is necessary to know about and understand what makes a good organizational host and how such organizations can be made and sustained. This volume of New Directions for Youth Development is organized around the different organizational change efforts at one municipal youth-serving organization to better support healthy youth development systemwide. Each article describes the different strategies and tactics used to support organizational transformation.